Kids still deliver the news in small Iowa towns; author writes book about those who did the job

Many changes have occurred in the newspaper business over the years. One change that doesn't get much attention is how the state of news carriers has changed, from the once longstanding tradition of children walking or riding their bikes through neighborhoods to deliver papers door-to-door to the more typical sight seen today of adults making deliveries via car. But in some small towns, fresh-faced kids—most of them probably experiencing their first job—are still delivering the news. (NPR photo by Noah Adams: Meridith Beeber on her paper route in Templeton, Iowa.)

One such case is in Carroll, Iowa (Wikipedia map: Carroll County), where in "a town of 10,000 surrounded by farmland, factories and parks, the award-winning Daily Times Herald still relies on young people to get the news to local homes each day," Noah Adams reports for NPR. "The family that owns and runs the paper believes the most important news they cover is about the town's young people—schools, sports, the arts—and it just makes sense to have them delivering those stories to the community." About 80 percent of the Herald's papers are delivered by children.

"The paper is a surviving exception to a trend," Adams writes. "Circulation managers at the two nearest big papers, The Des Moines Register and the Omaha World Herald, said they employ very few kids.  One big thing that makes it work here is that the paper comes out only five days a week, and in the afternoon—after school. It's a local family-owned operation with 16 pages and lots of color pictures. In 2013 it was named Iowa's 'Newspaper of the Year.'"

"Doug Burns, the vice president for news and son of the paper's co-owner, carried a paper route for many years as a kid. But he has misgivings, he says, about the way it's going now," Adams writes. Burns told him, "You see more parents around their kids, helping their kids with the route, rather than realizing that this was maybe the first opportunity for a young person to have independence. There was sort of a beautiful solitude in delivering papers in the era that I did it, that I think is probably missing from the experience today."

Some carriers, like Jaxson Kuhlmann, are gaining the full experience, Adams writes. Kuhlmann, who delivers 36 to 38 papers daily on his figure-eight shaped route within a three-block radius of his home, earns about $45 every two weeks. He told Adams, "I'm saving up for a trip to Washington D.C.—it's a class trip." (Read more)

UPDATE: Linda Ireland, editor of the LaRue County Herald-News in Kentucky, sends us a copy of a story she wrote about a local man who is one of several former child paper carriers in a book, Little Merchants, by Sandra L. Walker of Washington state. Grant Wise recalls for Ireland his adventures as a carrier and how it taught him about money, responsibility and community in a small town. To read the story, click here.